The outbreak of revolution in 1821 had repercussions in virtually every town with a mixed Turkish and Greek population in Greece itself or in Asia Minor. Where the Greeks quickly achieved dominance, as in much of the Peloponnese, it was the Turks who suffered most. In other parts of Greece, however, and in the mixed townships of Asia Minor, Turks outnumbered Greeks and a combination of Turkish government policy and local feelings of resentment, fuelled by news of Turkish reverses, often put individuals, families and whole communities in danger.
Makriyánnis nearly died at the hands of the Turks in Árta. He had been in Patras when the revolution broke out, but arrived in Árta a week later, on Easter Sunday, to give news of the revolt to his fellow members of the Philikí Etería. There he was promptly arrested ‘as an unreliable subject of the Sultan, since I had been over to the Morea’. Twenty-five of his fellow prisoners were hanged, but he was thrown into a dungeon for further questioning under torture. His account continues:
There were one hundred and eighty of us there. The place was full of rotten loaves of bread and we had to empty our bowels on them because there was nowhere else. The filth and the stink were abominable, none worse in the whole world. We pushed our noses against the keyhole of the door to get fresh air. And they beat me and inflicted innumerable tortures on me and almost finished me off. As a result of the beating, my body swelled up and became inflamed and I was at death’s door.1
However, Makriyánnis bribed a guard to let him out to see a doctor, escaped, and survived to take part in that summer’s operations in the Makrinóros and in many of the revolution’s later battles.
At Smyrna, which was a prosperous centre of international trade on the west coast of Asia Minor, the whole Greek community was in danger. Turkish forces were assembled there before embarking to fight the rebels in Moldavia–Wallachia or the Peloponnese, but with little to do and no proper arrangements for feeding them these troops soon turned to plunder. The situation was inflamed at the beginning of June when news arrived of the destruction by Greek fireships of a Turkish frigate at Eresós, only eighty-five miles away on the coast of Lésvos. As Gordon recorded, ‘3000 ruffians assailed the Greek quarter, plundered the houses and slaughtered the people; Smyrna resembled a place taken by assault, neither age or sex being respected.’2 The marauders sought from the mullah a fatwa justifying a general slaughter of the Christians; the mullah refused, and was himself killed. The consuls in Smyrna sent a joint letter of protest to the Turkish governor pointing out that the European merchants were there under the guarantee of the Sultan’s protection, and had brought great wealth to the town; if disorder continued, they would leave, and the trade on which Smyrna had flourished would collapse. Furthermore, the Turks had their international reputation to consider: ‘Reports of the present misdeeds will spread throughout Europe, and even reach America.’3 It was a prophetic statement, though one that was probably of little concern to the Smyrna governor at the time. The events at Smyrna in the summer of 1821 were given dramatic treatment in the classic 1897 story by Dhimítrios Vikélas, Loukís Láras, in which a young boy, the eponymous hero, survives with his family the terrors of Smyrna only to be caught up a year later in the massacres on Chios. As Vikélas wrote, the history of the struggle consists not only of military victories but of the persecution, slaughter and dishonour of the defenceless and weak, and of their fortitude in affliction.
The most dramatic example of the Turkish reaction to the revolution was at Constantinople, and stemmed not from harsh policing as at Árta or from the habitual unruliness of troops on the move as at Smyrna, but directly from Ottoman government decisions approved or promulgated by the Sultan himself.
The Sultan, Mahmud II, had ascended the throne in 1808, and held it until his death in 1839, making his reign one of the longest in Ottoman history. Mahmud had come to power by a hard route, and was no stranger to acts of ferocity. His two immediate predecessors, both his cousins, were Selim III (1789–1807) and Mustafa IV (1807–8), and the reigns of both had been dominated by the question of reform of the army. By the end of the eighteenth century the janissaries were no longer the Sultan’s elite troops of earlier times, but had become a much enlarged, disorderly and self-indulgent rabble, protesting with force against any attempt to curtail their privileges. As a counterweight to the janissaries, Selim III set up in 1792 the so-called Army of the New Order, initially a small body of a few hundred men with a European nucleus of Germans and Russians, trained on European lines and with European discipline. In its early years it was kept out of the public view, but by 1807 it had grown to a force of some 22,500 and Selim felt strong enough to begin incorporating the janissaries into it. However he had underestimated his opponents. When in July 1807 a pasha went to announce the start of incorporation to the janissaries stationed in the Bosphorus fortresses, they turned on him and killed him and his guards. This was a signal for the whole corps of janissaries to gather in force outside the Sultan’s palace, and, despite Selim’s craven attempt at appeasement by formally abolishing the New Order, they now demanded his replacement by his cousin Mustafa. Selim was allowed to retire to imprisonment in the harem, and Mustafa IV was acclaimed sultan.
His reign was short lived. A new military force now entered the picture, the experienced troops in the Bulgarian provinces led by Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha, a supporter of the New Order. In July of the following year Mustafa Pasha marched on Constantinople with the intention of restoring Selim III. When these forces surrounded the palace, the Sultan sent his executioners to strangle, with the traditional silken cord, both the deposed Selim and the young Mahmud, calculating that if these two last survivors of the house of Osman were eliminated he himself could not be deposed. Selim was found and executed, but Mahmud escaped detection, fleeing through the palace’s warren of passages and chambers, and was proclaimed sultan in Mustafa’s place. The deposed Mustafa was imprisoned in the same rooms as Selim had occupied, but within months was himself strangled on Mahmud’s orders. Mahmud was now the last of the house of Osman, whose founder had died nearly five centuries earlier.
The first decade of Mahmud’s reign was dominated by two concerns. One, inherited from his predecessors, was to build an army both to support his authority in the capital and to control the unruly provinces of the Ottoman empire. In Arabia the desert warriors, the Wahabis, had captured first Medina in 1804 and then Mecca in 1807, the two holy cities of the empire. In 1817 the Sultan was forced to grant limited autonomy to Serbia, and in Epirus Ali Pasha was a continuing threat. Mahmud’s second concern was the encroachment of Russia. Turkey had been forced by the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji of 1774 to make major concessions to Russia, which were extended by further treaties in the following decades. In both his domestic and foreign concerns Mahmud’s conduct was distinguished by patience, determination, a willingness to concede when necessary before advancing where possible, and a readiness to act forcefully and brutally at the decisive moment. The Sultan’s adviser, Halet Effendi, was said to have quoted a Turkish proverb that described Mahmud’s method: ‘The mole works in silence and darkness but he makes his way as he purposes. The pace of the tortoise is slow, but if he makes sure of every ascending step, he at last reaches the hilltop. The scorpion conceals his sting, and is a quiet and contemptible reptile, until he can dart it with death into his foe.’4 Why then did Mahmud choose, as his most dramatic response to the Greek rebellion, the public execution at Easter of the Greek Orthodox patriarch Grigórios, an act which did nothing to help quell his rebellious subjects and violently antagonised the Greeks’ fellow Orthodox nation and potential ally, his old enemy Russia?
The Sultan’s action against Grigórios was the culmination of some weeks of increasingly disturbing news of Greek activities. First in early March came the discovery of a plot, by Greeks serving in the Turkish navy, to set fire to the dockyard arsenal, assassinate the Sultan, seize the capital’s artillery and arm the Greek population. It was a bold, perhaps hare-brained scheme, but in the event it was discovered in time and its leader, a captain from Hydra with a senior command in the Turkish navy, was arrested and imprisoned with his associates. Then, with Easter still a month away, information reached the capital of the killings of Turks at Galatz and Iaşi in Moldavia which had marked the start of Alexander Ipsilántis’ campaign. Finally, reports were brought to Constantinople a week before Easter of the outbreak of revolution in the Peloponnese and the attendant killing of many thousands of Turks.
The reactions of the Ottoman authorities became increasingly fierce as the news became more alarming. On the discovery of the plot to burn the dockyard they did no more than expel non-resident Greeks from the city and institute a search for hidden arms. When news of Alexander Ipsilántis’ expedition arrived, the patriarch was ordered to denounce him, which he did in uncompromising terms. The authorities arrested seven bishops and held them as hostages for Greek good behaviour, and brought in troops from outside the city, who soon began to murder Greeks and plunder their houses. All Greeks in Constantinople had now become suspect, even the educated and prosperous phanariot Greeks, and news of the rising in the Peloponnese initiated a series of executions. The victims included a phanariot holding the high office of dragoman of the Porte, two former dragomans of the fleet, a member of the distinguished Mavrokordhátos family, a number of merchants and bankers, and three men suspected of a plot to poison Constantinople’s water supplies. Three monks and two priests are also recorded as having been executed, but, though bishops had been taken as hostages, until Easter Sunday no senior member of the clergy had been harmed.
In the early hours of darkness on Easter Sunday, the Christians were summoned by the crier to celebrate the risen Christ. They made their way without hindrance through the janissaries who thronged the streets to the patriarchal church of Áyios Georgios where the patriarch Grigórios was to preside over the Easter service. Grigórios was now an old man, and in his third period of office as patriarch. Born around 1750 in Dhimitsána in the central Peloponnese, he had risen rapidly through the church hierarchy, becoming bishop of Smyrna in 1785 and patriarch for the first time in 1797. It was at this period that he formed a lasting friendship with Yermanós, later to be bishop of Old Patras. Grigórios was deposed after eighteen months for favouring the French at a time when Napoleon had invaded the Ottoman province of Egypt. He was banished to Mount Athos, but was re-elected patriarch in 1806 when Turkey became France’s ally against Russia and Britain. However, the wheel turned again when in 1808 the army from Bulgaria moved into Constantinople and installed Mahmud II as sultan. Grigórios fell foul of the army’s commander and was dismissed, spending another ten years on Mount Athos before returning as patriarch for the third time in 1818. Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British embassy in Constantinople, visited Grigórios during his final patriarchate and described him as ‘thin, pale, very aged, apparently past eighty years, with a venerable white beard; his dress was a robe of simple crape, which covered his head’.5
The outbreak of the Greek revolution put Grigórios in an impossible position. As patriarch he was responsible for the good behaviour of the Christians, under the original agreement between Mehmed, the conqueror of Constantinople, and Yennádhios, the first patriarch under the Ottomans. However, Grigórios had no means of controlling the Greeks’ behaviour since the bishops, even his old friend Yermanós, and the lower clergy paid no attention to his calls for submission to the government. In denouncing rebellion when Alexander Ipsilántis initiated it, he was not only following the instructions of his temporal master, but also probably trying to save his flock from self-destruction. In the end the denunciations did nothing to satisfy the Ottoman authorities, failed to divert the Greeks from their course, and served only to alienate Christian clergy and laity from the head of their church.
Having concluded the service on Easter Sunday 1821 Grigórios returned to his own quarters as dawn broke. Almost immediately he was summoned to a hastily convened meeting of the Holy Synod by the dragoman of the Porte, who was accompanied by a secretary. The secretary then produced two edicts, the first deposing Grigórios as ‘unworthy of the patriarchal throne, ungrateful and unfaithful to the Porte, and guilty of intriguing’, and the second calling on the Synod to elect a successor immediately, a choice which fell on Evyénios, the bishop of Pisidia. Grigórios was led away, but at noon on Easter Sunday was brought back to the patriarchate and there hanged from the hasp fastening its central doors, which in memory of the event are to this day painted black and welded permanently shut. According to Walsh’s account, ‘His person, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age, had not weight sufficient to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain, which no friendly hand dared to abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his last convulsions were over.’6 That same evening, it is said, the grand vizier Benderli Ali and later the Sultan himself came and gazed at the patriarch’s body. A statement of the Ottoman accusations, lengthy but vague, was attached to the corpse. After three days the patriarch’s body was taken down and as a final insult a party of Jews, regarded as inveterately hostile to the Christians, was ordered to drag it through the filthy streets and throw it into the harbour. In the Jews’ defence it was said that they performed their office under duress and ‘with great calmness and decency’. The body was retrieved from the water by the captain of a ship from Kephaloniá, and taken to Odessa where on the instructions of the outraged Tsar the funeral ceremony was conducted with every elaboration of ritual and every mark of respect.
In the weeks that followed the execution of the patriarch, the Turkish authorities appeared to be doing everything possible to antagonise Russia still further. The banker to the Russian embassy was arrested on suspicion of providing funds for Greek rebels, and all efforts by the Russian ambassador, Count Stroganov, to intercede for him or to be shown proof of his guilt were brusquely rejected. These personal insults were followed by commercial aggravation: the Turks began seizing grain ships flying the Russian flag as they passed Constantinople on their way from the Black Sea to the Aegean. The pretext was that the city was short of food because supplies from Moldavia–Wallachia had been interrupted by Ipsilántis’ incursion, but the real reason, it was thought, was to stop grain reaching the rebels in Greece. Violent affronts to the Orthodox faith also continued. Churches were wrecked, and senior members of the clergy, including all the seven bishops held as hostages, were executed.
Stroganov tried to enlist the support of the other ambassadors at Constantinople in his protests against these actions. He sought a collective condemnation of the execution of the patriarch, but to no avail, and was equally unsuccessful with his proposal that the ambassadors should jointly ask for naval vessels to be sent to Constantinople for the protection of themselves and the Christian population. When Britain’s ambassador Viscount Strangford refused to go along with the latter idea, Stroganov is said to have ‘presumed publicly to say to the British ambassador, “that his name would descend to posterity, stained with blood” ’, and, on leaving the room, he is believed to have addressed to him these words: ‘My Lord, I would wish you too, good-night, were I not assured that with such a conscience you can never sleep.’7
The Tsar’s own approaches to the other powers, embodied in a memorandum of 4 July, fared no better. Metternich, the inveterate opponent of revolutionary movements, had of course ranged Austria firmly on the side of the Turks. Castlereagh for Britain replied that he viewed the Greek revolt as another symptom of ‘that organised spirit of insurrection which is systematically propagating itself throughout Europe’.8 Prussia initially favoured collective action, but this made no headway against opposition from Metternich and Castlereagh. France’s counsels were divided and her reaction ambivalent; the French government, it has been said, was inclined to run several contradictory policies at the same time in the confident expectation that they could not all fail.9
Tsar Alexander therefore proceeded with an ultimatum of his own to the Ottoman government, though one that implied much greater support from the other powers than he had in fact obtained. The document was drafted by Kapodhístrias, and made the strongest case against the Turks and in favour of the Greeks that Kapodhístrias was ever to pen for his master. The Turks were accused of insulting the Orthodox faith, proscribing Russia’s fellow Christians, breaking Russo-Turkish treaties and, most important of all, threatening ‘to disturb the peace that Europe has bought at so great a sacrifice’. Unless Turkey acceded to the Russian demands for restoration of the damaged churches and for justice in determining the guilt or innocence of individuals, Russia would issue a formal declaration that:
the Ottoman government has placed itself in a state of open hostility against the Christian world; that it has legitimized the defence of the Greeks, who would thenceforth be fighting solely to save themselves from inevitable destruction; and that in view of the nature of that struggle, Russia would find herself strictly obliged to offer them help because they were persecuted; protection, because they would be in need of it; assistance, jointly with the whole of Christendom, because she could not surrender her brothers in religion to the mercy of a blind fanaticism.10
Stroganov presented this ultimatum to the Turkish government on 18 July, and as instructed allowed seven days for a reply; when none was received by then, he broke off diplomatic relations and prepared to leave. The Reis Effendi, the Ottoman foreign minister, did produce a reply one day later but Stroganov rejected it as being out of time, and after a fortnight’s frustrating delay because of bad weather sailed from Constantinople on 10 August, his five-year mission at an end. He had failed to achieve any collective action by the ambassadors at Constantinople, just as the Tsar had failed on the wider European stage to win the support of any of the other powers, in spite of his talk of acting ‘jointly with the whole of Christendom’. It was clear that if Russia went to war with Turkey she would have to act alone, and this she was not prepared to do.
The Ottoman authorities gave their reasons for executing Grigórios in the document of some 500 words which was attached, as was customary, to the hanging corpse. The document began by saying that the duty of the leaders of subject peoples was to watch their conduct day and night, report any misdeeds to the government and prevent such misdeeds by advice, threats or if necessary punishment. However, the statement continued, it was impossible to regard the patriarch as uninvolved in the revolution; to all appearances he was a secret participant in it; in fact he was the prime cause of the disturbances, bringing harm to the government and the imminent total destruction of the Greek people. Hence his execution.11
The document clearly fails to establish a case against Grigórios. He had done all that he was asked to do in condemning revolution, most recently in his fierce denunciation of Alexander Ipsilántis and all who supported him. No evidence was offered to substantiate the progression from ‘not uninvolved’ in the revolution to ‘secret participant’ to ‘prime cause’. The British ambassador Strangford was told by the Reis Effendi that only on the day before the patriarch’s execution ‘a fresh mass of the most convincing evidence against him had been submitted to the Sultan, who, in a fit of violent anger and indignation had ordered his immediate execution’.12 However, this mass of evidence was never shown to Strangford or to anyone else; and the Sultan was the last person to allow a fit of anger to determine a highly political action.
Some later historians have tried to demonstrate Grigórios’ involvement with the rising; this would enhance his standing as a Greek patriot but would also, of course, go some way to justify his execution. Their main evidence is a letter of July 1819 from Grigórios to Petrobey Mavromichális, commending his plan to establish a school in the Mani and sending a contribution to it of 45,000 piastres. It is suggested that ‘school’ was simply the Philikí Etería’s code for ‘revolution’, and that this was the purpose for which the society’s agent Perrevós used the money. Donations to the Philikí Etería were often disguised as contributions to schools, but it is only speculation that Grigórios was using ‘school’ in this coded sense, and many schools were in fact founded in the years before the revolution. Neither Grigórios’ Greek supporters nor his Turkish accusers have ever convincingly demonstrated his secret support for his compatriots’ revolt.
Was the object of Grigórios’ execution simply to intimidate the Greeks into submission? If so, the action was ill judged: the patriarch had so distanced himself from the revolution in his public pronouncements that his death could hardly be seen as a blow to it. The Greek reaction seems to have been neither fear nor outrage but, surprisingly, indifference. There is very little reference to his execution in the memoirs of the participants, and Grigórios’ old friend Bishop Yermanós makes no mention of it at all. Another possible explanation might be that the Ottoman authorities wanted a more compliant figure on the patriarchal throne. But Grigórios could hardly have done more to carry out their wishes, and when his successor Evyénios was called on for another denunciation of the Greeks in August 1821 he could only attempt to outfawn the obsequious words of Grigórios, condemning the Greeks’ ‘weakness and madness’ in opposing ‘this invincible Government which has ever loved and cherished all alike’.13
The most likely interpretation is that among the Sultan’s advisers there was a continuing conflict between hawks and doves, and that the patriarch’s execution represented a token victory for the hawks. According to Finlay, Mahmud had by now come to distrust two of the apparent doves, ‘both Halet Effendi, hitherto his favourite minister, and Benderli Ali, his grand-vizier, whom he considered too favourable to the Greeks and too fearful of Russia’.14 Halet Effendi, who memorably compared Mahmud with the mole, the tortoise and the scorpion, was a cautious conservative, protecting the traditional status of both the janissaries and the Greek phanariots. He later fell from favour, and was executed at the end of the following year. Benderli Ali lost his post of grand vizier a few weeks after the patriarch’s death, and under his successor the executions of Greek clergy and other leaders immediately intensified. It is possible that Benderli Ali’s visit to view the patriarch’s corpse, ascribed by some to triumphalism, was actually an indication of regret. It was part of Mahmud’s policy throughout his reign to control the factions that surrounded him by giving first one and then the other a freer hand. On this interpretation the execution of the patriarch was a demonstration by the newly installed hawks in the Sultan’s inner circle of advisers that they would stop at nothing to crush the Greek rebellion, even the killing of the titular head of the Greek community without trial and without producing evidence of guilt, and despite the lip-service he had paid to the Ottoman government. Insofar as they considered the Russian response, they reckoned, on this scenario, that they could get away with it – as, in the event, they did.